Book Report: Coyote Destiny, by Allen Steele

Coyote Destiny, by Allen Steele

This is the fifth, and if the author is to be believed (and why wouldn't he?) last of the novels in the Coyote series.

A spaceship from Earth, the first in years, reaches Coyote with word that the messianic prophet called the Chaaz'maha survived the explosion that destroyed the first Coyote starbridge. The news sets off two story lines: the quest to bring the Chaaz'maha home, and the hunt for the person who created the explosives responsible.

This one struck me as more of a coda than a climax. Previous books have dealt with weighty threats to survival, liberty and faith. This one is more intimate, dealing with loss and hope on a personal level. The book also sees the passing of the last of the first generation of Coyote settlers, something that carries considerably emotional weight for those who have read the series since its beginning.

All in all, I found this less impressive than the earlier books... BUT! That doesn't make this any less an amazing novel. Steele draws characters which are familiar to us in a landscape which is unfamiliar and yet as detailed and consistent as any location we might visit here on Earth. Although this is the last book, the reader can still feel the future of Coyote stretching out beyond our ken, full of stories.

Ulysses Rating: 3 - I enjoyed this.

Junk Drawer Ramble

Current Reading: Pinion, by Jay Lake

Inspirational Quote: "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." -- Thomas A. Edison.

Yesterday, Virginia decided it didn't like it's current location, so it picked itself up and moved itself about a quarter of an inch. It then settled back down, either content with its new location or exhausted from the move. No one can be sure. There are no certainties when geography gets restless.

A few days ago, Jack Layton, a Canadian politician who lead the federal New Democratic Party to it's current position as official opposition, died of cancer. In a rare move, the Prime Minister of Canada decided to hold a state funeral to honor his fallen opponent. Mr. Layton was only beginning to exert his influence in federal politics, and I think the business of the Nation will suffer for his absence.

The 2011 WorldCon SFF convention was held this past weekend in Reno, Nevada. I was not there. My absence was, of course, noted by almost no-one except me. However, I've been watching the Hugo Awards, which is the next best thing to being there in exactly the same way that hearing someone talk about Matchbox cars is the next best thing to driving in the Grand Prix. Next year, WorldCon is in Chicago. I want to go. However, since it falls over the same weekend as my 23rd anniversary, the odds of my being able to convince Penelope to tolerate my going (or even... gasp... come with me) are about equivalent to the odds of an ice-cube surviving a thermonuclear detonation.

Sigh.

So: every house I know of has a junk drawer. I don't know why. I think it's traditional. The junk drawer's express purpose is to serve as a repository for all those bits and pieces and odds and ends that don't really have any other place. Shoe laces. Batteries. Mismatched screws. Extra scissors. Mine has nightlights and doorstops and baby-proofing hardware leftover from before Cassandra stopped crawling.

Junk drawers are notable for three things:

(1) They're always in the kitchen. If you're ever walking down the street and suddenly find yourself in need of a button, or elastic band, or a bit of string, just walk into any house. Find the kitchen and start opening drawers. You'll find what you need inside of five minutes. Guaranteed. I don't know why it's always in the kitchen. Probably because that's usually where you are when you realize you need something obscure. Possibly because it's one of the few non-bedroom rooms in the house that has lots of drawers.

(2) They have a tendency to swell. When you move in, you've got one junk drawer that's half-full of stuff you know you're going to need eventually. A few years later, the drawer's full. A few years after that, it's a drawer and a bin on the kitchen counter and you've got no idea what's in it. Once in a while, you open it up and go "Hey! That's where that went! I haven't seen that in months. I'll have to remember it's there!" Then you close the drawer and five minutes later you've forgotten all about whatever it was. Soon it becomes a closet... but only the first two shelves. Or four. Or, okay, the whole closet. We'll find somewhere else to keep the blankets.

My parents have a shed. It's basically a massive junk drawer outside the main house. It contains nothing anyone would ever possibly need, but it's all stuff they don't want to get rid of because... well, you might never need it but the moment you get rid of it you're going to wish you hadn't.

(3) They contain everything. The cure for cancer is sitting in someone's junk drawer right now. So is Jimmy Hoffa. The end of Schubert's unfinished symphony was stuck in a junk drawer and lost to the ages. Einstein postulated that the average junk drawer contains a sufficient mass of esoteric matter as to form wormholes. Every junk drawer is in fact merely a visible manifestation of a single universal drawer which contains the missing dark matter required to close the universe.

Of course, the mathematics proving this were lost when Albert stuck the proof in a kitchen drawer and forgot about it.

Ad Astra

Current Reading: Scientific American. I have a lot of issues to catch up on. I'm about 6 months behind.

Inspirational Quote: "Per ardua ad astra." -- Motto of the RCAF.

On July 21st, the space shuttle Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center. It was the last flight of a program that began in 1981 with the maiden voyage of the Columbia. I remember watching the mission, although I can't recall details. I was 13, and it seemed like the stars were opening up to us. Within a few years, I thought, we'll have a space station as a jumping off point for Luna. Then, from Luna, in a few years more, we'll have the first manned expedition to Mars.

Of course, I was disappointed. But then, the aliens from Close Encounters never landed in real life either, and I'm STILL disappointed by that.

For the next 3 years, I watched every launch I could. After that, I was at University and spent more time reading and making things go bang than I did watching the news. The rest of the world grew more apathetic as well, as shuttle launches began their migration from front-page news to footnotes in the newspaper science section... if it had one. Of course, the disasters disrupted the program and made the shuttle news again, but on the whole, space travel became a regular part of life on earth: "Pauly Shore has made a movie that isn't funny, the space shuttle Discovery did something, and the Maple Leafs failed to make the playoffs..."

Now, the program is over. Outer space is once more a distant frontier, with the Americans depending on the Russians to act as taxi drivers if they need a trip to the ISS.

We were discussing the demise of the shuttle program a few days ago when a friend asked me what the program had contributed. What had it done? Why was it a big deal? I thought about it for some time before giving the wrong answer: something about the ceramics knowledge that was developed while they were trying to create the heat shield tiles.

The real answer is that science isn't a matter of breakthroughs. It's about expanding knowledge, and the shuttle was a tool that made possible a myriad of incremental expansions. I don't know of any major leaps forward in science or technology that the shuttle created, but I know hundreds of experiments, some by school kids, would never have yielded results without the shuttle's ability to carry them into orbit.

But more important, the shuttle was a dream given form (a quote from Babylon 5). A generation of kids grew up seeing the shuttle launches and landings. They saw space not as something distant and unachievable, but as a place next door that they could visit someday. Heck, they even let Canadians on the thing. We never got around to going back to the moon. Mars is just a place we throw big hunks of expensive metal at every few years. But for a little while, we regularly stepped outside our atmosphere and stood on the threshold of the infinite, looking out at the still-distant stars and in at the blue marble where we lived.

By the time the shuttles retired, they were 30 years old. Aeons in technology terms. They are museum pieces now, as they deserve to be. They are reminders of what we can achieve, and of what we have yet to achieve, and I'm going to miss them.

*Image courtesy of NASA.

Pimp my Ride

Current Reading: Grail, by Elizabeth Bear

Inspirational Quote: "Get a horse!" - Anonymous

I have a new chariot.

Well, new is relative, actually. It's new to me. It even smells new. Of course, it smells like it's been new for a long time.

But I digress.

My previous chariot was a '98 Saturn SL2. I loved it. It ran. It complained very little. Once in a while I had to replace things, or repair bits that broke or fell off, but on the whole it ran reliably and handled my daily 30km commute with as close to grace as you can get in a 4-door economy car.

In the last year, though, it began to develop some... quirks. The catalytic converter disintegrated one fine morning, announcing its death with a deafening growl that encouraged the entire neighborhood to wake up at 7am and enjoy the early spring sunrise. The wheel bearings had suffered the ravages of one too many salt-stained winters and had begun to hum. Riding in it was like riding inside a beehive stuffed with bees the size of elephants. The horn stopped working. If I used the "mist" function on the windshield wipers, I could never be sure when they would finally turn off. The record run was 2.5 days. It reduced my wipers to rubber strips.

But the unforgivable failure was the hole that appeared in my steering column expressly for the purpose of emptying the system of every drop of steering fluid.

It took some time to find a used car to my liking. I have standards. They're low, I admit, but they exist. During the search period, I kept myself on the road by purchasing buckets of steering fluid and administering them to the car whenever I started to need a torque wrench to make a corner. In retrospect, it would have made more sense to hook an I.V. under the hood. As a result, my preferred parking spaces at work, the grocery store, my home, and everywhere else I went became decorated by a Rorshach oil blot the size of a large beaver. I could follow my progress around town by the lines of shiny drops I left everywhere. I was environmentally hostile, and I was ashamed, but I had things to do and places to go.

Finally, I found something I could afford. By "afford," I mean, of course, "manage by entering into a level of debt that was just under the maximum I could manage without courting bankruptcy."

I was due to pick it up on a Monday at 6pm.

Sunday afternoon, at 4pm, I was on my way home from picking up my sons. On the downhill run to an intersection with a highway, the radio suddenly went morse-code with static. The gages on the dash twitched like an epileptic wearing a joy buzzer. I did not regard this as a good thing, and expressed that view to my children in a series of metaphors I shall not repeat here. We came to a halt at the stop sign, and when the way was clear to the horizon, we started across. Snails have demonstrated greater pickup.

I floored it. We were going a staggering 20k/h by the time I reached the far side of the highway. I kept it floored, the speedometer and tachometer ignoring my efforts as the engine accelerated in its own time, until I'd achieved something like the proper speed.

At which point the radio tuned itself to static and every single gage went to zero. The AC and fans continued to work, but everything else, including the automatic transmission, died. I commented upon this occurrence vigorously, furthering my children's education in the profane arts.

We made it home, stuck in what I believe was third gear. Once I had the chariot safely parked, I turned off the ignition. Because I am the type of person to poke bruises and pick scabs, I tried to start the car again. It laughed at me. I could hear it. "Hur hur hur hur," it said.

So I pulled the key out of the ignition for the last time, climbed out, and took a moment to study the hunk of metal and polymer that, for thirteen years and 320000km had gotten my sorry tail where it wanted to go. I'd bought it new. It was my first car. It still sits in my driveway, empty and dead. I haven't been able to bring myself to call the wreckers and have it towed away. A friend of mine wants to take it off my hands. He thinks it can be resurrected, with a little work. I'd like to see that.

The new car is nice. Cruise control. Heated seats. The horn works and the wipers turn off right away.

We'll how it handles the years.

*Image from here.

Beep.

Apologies.
Still alive.
2011? So far, the worst year of my life.

Further entries WILL be forthcoming.
I'd play a test pattern if I had one.

All Is Vanity

Current Reading: An issue of Canada's History Magazine (formerly The Beaver).

Inspirational Quote: "I'm not confused, I'm just well mixed" -- Robert Frost

Well, obviously, not ALL is vanity. Some of it is apples. And a little bit of it is people with red hair. But, you know, OVERALL, it looks like vanity if you squint.

I apologize yet again for the long delay between posts. I have plenty of excuses, but none of them will go back in time and force me to fill in the blanks, so they're useless.


Of course, sometimes I haven't been able to think of anything to write. This is a fallacy, of course. I'm looking at things the wrong way around. I simply need to write what I think and stop waiting for the perfect planetary alignment, or geological convergence, or whatever to light the fires of inspiration.

It's true that this approach will lead me to post nonsense that nobody outside my head could possibly care about.

But then the same phrase could describe the archives in their entirety. So, the more things change...

I really have to comment on the election. It was remarkable. We elected a majority Conservative government, which I fear to my toes because Mr. Harper's heavy-handed techniques and autocratic style make me suspect that his decisions will be hard on those of us who are not rich and priviledged.

I hope he proves me wrong.

Outgoing Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff watched his party shrink to a tiny fraction of its former size. I don't think anybody saw that coming. One of his final comments struck me as prophetic, though. When asked what their defeat meant for the federal Liberal party in the next election, he said that it was good news. "Nothing could be better for the Liberal party than four years of Conservative majority government with an NDP opposition."

The Bloc Quebecois was likewise annihilated. I'm okay with that. I think a party that espouses a distinctly provincial agenda and advocates disruption of the federation really shouldn't be in federal politics.

Now we have the NDP as official opposition. It has a few members who have been in the House before, but for the most part they are all rookies, and many of them are barely out of their teens. I get the feeling that most of them were watching the returns with as much disbelief as the rest of the country. "What the hell do you mean I won? I can't win! I don't know how to do anything!"

Yeah. Neither does anyone else. Congratulations on your outstanding qualifications. The job's yours.

Of course, they are the official opposition to a majority government, so even if they had the most savvy politicos on the planet running their caucus, they STILL wouldn't be able to do anything more effective than boo loudly. They are a tale told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The interesting thing about politics, though, is that after such a tremendous popular upheaval in which everything changed... once the new parliament sits on June 2, it'll still be business as usual.

To Be, Or Not To Be

Current Reading: A combination of Scientific American and Discover Magazines from the last few months.

Inspirational Quote: "Lord we may know what we are, but know not what we may be." -William Shakespeare

I went to see a movie last month: Limitless. It's about a man who takes a pill that amps up his intellect. It's an intriguing premise, but the movie didn't take it in a direction that interested me, instead devolving into a pseudo-thriller/pseudo-superhero tale with superfluous violence. Good for popcorn sales, not so much for intellectual stimulation.



What intrigued me about this is the idea behind this line from the trailer: "How many of us ever know what it is to become the perfect version of ourselves?"

Of course, before we even start to think about this, we need to know exactly what we mean by "perfect." Defining "success" is hard enough. Defining "Perfection" is a task close to impossible.

Still, we can ask some simpler and more specific questions: How do we make ourselves the most creative we can be? The smartest? The most courageous? How do we overcome our weaknesses, our fears and doubts, and become the best we can?

How do we realize our potential?

In the film, it's a pill. I don't think that's a good way to go. It'd be revolting to think that my personal development depended on something that "wore off."

But beyond medication, there's the billion-dollar self-help industry. Dale Carnegie. Steven Covey. Every MBA with a book. They'll give you 12 steps, or 7 habits, or 9 favored aspects which, if followed religiously, will set your highest and best nature free of its restraints. They promise success (whatever definition may apply), and they may well deliver for all I know, but I honestly question how effective they are at promoting generic personal development.

But speaking of following something "religiously," there's religion itself. There are lots of belief systems, each of which is the only one you'll ever need. Each, if you follow its precepts, promises enlightenment or salvation or the chance to become a higher, better being.

I'm not dumb enough to even try to comment on the effectiveness of this approach beyond saying, "It works for some people."

I believe the realization of personal potential is the goal of individual existence. I often hear people ask themselves, "What am I here for? What's my purpose?" as though they're looking for some niche in which they can slot themselves and say, "this is it." I don't think it works that way. I think our purpose is to try to become our best selves, nothing more, but in attempting that I have no doubt we will do things more wonderful than we ever thought possible.